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Your Password Isn’t Safe: 90% Are Vulnerable to Hacking, Says Report

Yahoo! Finance, By: Lisa Scherzer

Think you’ve got a clever, un-hackable password?

You might want to tack on a few numbers to it. Global consulting firm Deloitte released a report
Tuesday with an alarming prediction. More than 90% of user-generated
passwords will be vulnerable to hacking, the report, prepared by
Deloitte’s Canadian Technology, Media & Telecommunications arm,
said. Even those passwords traditionally considered strong — with eight
characters and a combination of numbers, letters and symbols — are at
risk.

It seems like every other week a major company reports its site was hacked in some way. A year ago online shoe store Zappos.com was hacked,
exposing the names, email addresses, phone numbers and partial credit
card numbers of 24 million customers, the company said. In June
networking site LinkedIn confirmed that a major security breach
corresponding to LinkedIn accounts compromised users’ passwords. About 400,000 Yahoo email addresses and passwords were hacked last July. (Yahoo! Finance is owned by Yahoo!.) And in 2011, 77 million passwords were stolen from Sony’s PlayStation Network. And that's just to name a few of the biggies.